Daily news and top headlines for broadband communications engineering and design professionals

While analysts have pointed their fingers at the pending merger of AT&T and TCI as the first true sign of impending telecommunications competition, the fact is that a handful of operators are already taking it to the RBOCs. These MSOs are reaching out and touching thousands of subscribers by leveraging their upgraded networks to deliver not only video and high-speed data, but facilities-bas...

In a short span of a few months, telephony-over-cable has quickly moved from lady-in-waiting to center stage. This "marriage" of telephony and HFC was consummated this summer when the most sober of corporations, AT&T, announced its merger with Tele-Communications Inc. AT&T further drove home its commitment to telephony-over-HFC when, in October, it placed an initial order of $50 million...

Cable operators tend to think narrowly about the HFC (hybrid fiber/coax) local access world when it comes to emerging telecom standards and services. Broadband local access is one of the most difficult and expensive issues facing the evolution of the public network. It's also been the most visible concern throughout the 1990s.

The technical pieces are rapidly coming together to open a path for cable into a vast range of service possibilities revolving around the functionalities of IP telecommunications. Within the industry, the two leading task forces charged with defining the parameters that will make such services possible are close to solidifying the key draft specifications as vendors prepare to roll out products...

The "brains" inside the next generation of advanced digital set-top boxes will be any one of a number of small, sophisticated operating systems that fall within the burgeoning category of "embedded applications." For now, PowerTV, the operating system chosen for Time Warner's Pegasus box, and Windows CE, the OS apparently selected by Tele-Communications Inc.

As the cable industry ventures ever further into the digital era and begins wide-scale deployment of set-tops, like it or not, the industry will discover, and more importantly have to learn to live with Moore's Law-that components will get better, faster and cheaper every 18 months. As a result, cable professionals will be living their own version of the popular children's fable and movie, "The...

Just like cable modems, the key to an interoperable, retail-available digital set-top is a standard to which manufacturers around the world can build. And just like cable modems, the digital set-top standard has made incredible progress in a short amount of time. It was only a year ago that CableLabs' Executive Committee officially stepped on the gas and put the "OpenCable" standardization effo...

Conventional wisdom says high-speed data-over-cable means you have to be big for the economics to work. As a result, companies have been designing huge data networks and planning for the traffic they'll carry. Yet interestingly, mid-sized and small operators are rushing into the high-speed data industry, often beating their larger brethren to the punch.

The Internet has always been about waiting-waiting for Web pages to download; waiting for more reliable and faster service; waiting for that killer application. Now the cable industry, with bandwidth-hungry customers anxious to move into the fast lane of the information superhighway, waits as the clocks ticks on an important deadline.

The North American cable industry's adoption of the Data-Over-Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) is solving long-standing problems of interoperability. But while this offers the cable industry the promise of lowered costs and good reliability, it presents only a partial solution to the vexing problem of interference on the upstream link between subscriber and headend.

September 30, 1998 8:00 pm |
by Jeffrey Krauss, Finger Pointer-in-Chief and President of Telecommunications and Technology Policy |
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